At the
Guardian Tim Adams and Robert McCrum tagged
fifteen of the best political novels and plays, including:
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
Rushdie’s novel took a post-colonial “empire fights back” spirit, and a deep personal understanding of the politics of Indian partition, and exploded them into something teeming with imaginative life. Drawing inspiration from the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez, his book found a voice, rooted in lived experience, to capture the sometimes brutal and often fantastical fallout of independence and its implications. Anglo-Indian narrator Saleem Sinai is “handcuffed to history” by the hour of his birth – at midnight on the day of India’s independence. He inhabits a hybrid consciousness, with a telepathic connection to the other children of midnight, and tells its stories for all he is worth.
Read about
another entry on the list.
Midnight's Children also appears among
five books that changed Vikram Chandra,
Sheena Iyengar's six best books,
Luke Leitch's ten most successful literary sequels ever, and John Mullan's lists of
ten of the best noses in literature and
ten of the best visits to the cinema in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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